Marketing
I started my professional life not in an agency, but in a consulting firm. EY, to be specific: the kind of place where every hour is billable, every slide is stress-tested, and your first year feels less like a job and more like being carefully broken down and rebuilt. I survived, barely. And I'm glad I did.
What EY gave me, beyond the sleepless nights and the overstretched billable hours, was something I've rarely found replicated in the advertising career that followed: a genuine model of what good looks like at every level of seniority, and the mentorship to get there. Seniors who invested real time in juniors. Partners who explained their reasoning rather than simply demanding outputs. A progression system built to grow people deliberately, and with care.
In two decades of advertising work that came after, I rarely encountered anything close to that structural generosity. Finance, it turns out, builds better teams than most agencies do. And it builds better strategy, too.
I say this not to be provocative, but because it shapes everything I believe about B2B marketing. Finance isn't the enemy of creative ambition. Finance, when applied with rigour and imagination, is the architecture that makes creative ambition sustainable.
Most marketers treat B2B as the quieter, less interesting sibling of consumer work. Rational, transactional, driven by product specs and procurement committees. And most marketers treat finance as the department that applies the brakes: to the big idea, to the long-term investment, to anything that can't be measured in a single quarter.
Depending on your perspective on the influence of finance in creative work, and I have had my fair share of fights in that octagon, but that reading could be a mistake, or at least misleading. Two Mastercard campaigns prove exactly why.
The first targeted women-owned small businesses in the US, a segment growing at twice the rate of the category, systematically ignored by every competitor. Mastercard didn't run a campaign at them. It built a platform with real funding, real partnerships, and real advisory councils, centered on a single strategic shift: stop asking what business someone is in, and start asking why they are in business. Banks noticed. Partners followed.
The second went further. Mastercard's network excludes no one by design, yet 1.4 billion people remain outside the financial system. Rather than run a purpose campaign, Mastercard built products: a card carrying a chosen name for transgender users, a card with tactile notches for the partially-sighted, an app giving dementia caregivers legally sound guardrails, a data platform built with the Polish government to help Ukrainian refugees find where to settle. Each product came with creative work designed to generate enough public momentum that B2B partners would feel confident backing it commercially.
The product was the pitch. Inclusion was not a value they declared. It was something they built into infrastructure, and then told as a story.
That's the logic worth taking home. Not the executions, not the channels. The logic: find the gap your category has accepted as unsolvable, prove it's solvable, and make your commercial partners more differentiated for backing you. When that works, the B2B pitch and the consumer campaign become the same document.
What connects both cases isn't the quality of the creative work, though it was exceptional. It's the clarity of the value creation logic. Both campaigns knew precisely what value they were building, for whom, and through which chain of commercial relationships. The consumer insight fed the product innovation. The product innovation fed the B2B pitch. The B2B pitch scaled the solution to millions of real people.
That kind of thinking doesn't originate in a creative brief. It originates upstream, where the business problem lives before it's been translated into a marketing objective. It's the kind of thinking I first encountered working through financial models at EY, years before I ever sat in a campaign debrief.
BBH's CFO Garin Bisschoff captures it simply. He says every decision inside a creative agency should be tested against one question: Does it make the work better?
This is the work I find most valuable to do with B2B teams: building the value creation narrative that connects a business truth to a consumer insight to a partner proposition. Not just a campaign platform, but the logical spine that holds everything together under commercial pressure. When that narrative is clear, the brief writes itself. When it's missing, no amount of creative ambition will close the gap.
If your B2B marketing feels disconnected from your commercial objectives, or if your partner conversations are still about features rather than outcomes, the narrative is usually the missing piece.
Pull up your last B2B campaign brief or partner pitch. Read it as your CFO would. Ask: what value is this actually creating, and for whom across the chain? If you can't answer that in two sentences, the narrative isn't ready yet. Start there, before any creative work begins.
Stay strategic, my friends.
This edition draws on two WARC-recognised Mastercard effectiveness cases: "Inclusive by Design" (Cannes Lions Creative Effectiveness, Bronze, 2024) and "Mastercard SMB: Her Ideas Start Something Priceless" (WARC Awards for Effectiveness, 2021), both developed with McCann. Additional perspective from Garin Bisschoff, CFO and Partner at BBH London, in conversation with Creative Salon, February 2026.